


all those shadows (almost killed your light)

by dixiehellcat



Series: Tony Stark Bingo 2020 [13]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: BACK ON MY BRAND, Body Modification, Canon Divergence - Avengers: Endgame (Movie), F/M, Nightmares, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Prosthetics, Tony Stark Lives, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, idk them, the Russos whomst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-27
Updated: 2020-09-27
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:15:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26673505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dixiehellcat/pseuds/dixiehellcat
Summary: Post-Endgame, Tony’s life is a healing process.This story fills all five slots on my September 2020 Tony Stark Flash Bingo, card 026! Chapter 1, Infinity Gauntlet; chapter 2, Morgan Stark; chapter 3, smell; chapter 4, alternative POV; chapter 5, PTSD. Also completes my Pepperony Bingo card, by filling in the free space in the middle. :DTitle from the Civil Wars and Taylor Swift, Safe and Sound.
Relationships: Pepper Potts/Tony Stark
Series: Tony Stark Bingo 2020 [13]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1765129
Comments: 7
Kudos: 31
Collections: Pepperony Bingo 2020, Tony Stark Bingo 2020, Tony Stark Flash Bingo





	1. Infinity Gauntlet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This story can be read as part of my Equilibrium verse (coming shortly after Pepper Potts and the Second Law of Thermodynamics, in the timeline--a thought Tony has here in chapter 1 would fit nicely with that; I will say no more lest I spoil the other story. lol); or as a standalone. Any option works. :)

Tony knelt in the remains of his armor, soaked with sweat. A sickly sweet stench assailed his nostrils. His mind was moving slowly, so slowly, as slowly as his body if not more so, but it finally penetrated his dazed brain, what the smell reminded him of: the smell of burning flesh, blazing terrorists, the smell that had followed him after he torched his captors’ camp in Afghanistan, sucked up in his wake as he launched skyward for the first time in the Mark One armor. What an ironic full circle his life had become—he burned them then to save his own life, and burned himself now to save everyone else’s lives. 

He dragged himself a few feet, and fell heavily onto his ass, knowing he would never stand again. His brain clicked, like an old-fashioned slide changer, and Pepper crouched before him. Her mouth moved, and she tried to smile. _Well, do the thing, honey_ , he thought, because on some level, he remembered that this was a repeat. Any second now, she would save him the way she always seemed to do, body or heart or soul. He had named her suit Rescue, and maybe it had been a moment of foretelling, of seeing she would rescue him. But no hand touched him. His ears roared, and the world went dark. He tried to scream, but his lungs wouldn’t work; his heart, that had fought off all comers for years longer than it should have, stuttered to a stop.

Tony’s eyes flew open. He was gasping for air, and drenched, those had been true enough, but he was sweating through nice pajamas, lying in his own bed in his lake house. Pep was not kneeling on a battlefield watching him die; she was snoring that cute little snore of hers right beside him, and he couldn’t decide whether to scream or cry. Fuck it all, there were times he wished he had never heard of any damned Infinity Gauntlet. His heart was working all too well, pounding away, and he forced himself to lie still and breathe and get himself back under control. _This is ridiculous_ , he thought dully. If things were still going to hell, if half the universe was still missing, that would be an excuse to have nightmares; but it was over. Thanks to Bruce, everybody was back; and Thanos was Roomba food, thanks to Tony (he had to take a moment to pat his ego every now and then, even now; he figured he was entitled). Thank fuck he hadn’t disturbed Pep, or Morgan in her little bed in the next room. He could keep this under his hat until his brain and body got the memo. _It’s over. We won._


	2. Morgan Stark

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony continues to wrestle with the aftermath of his ordeal.

For the life of him, Tony could not figure why the stupidest things could send his thoughts hurtling back to that awful day in the compound, when the world was restarting and for a minute he was certain his world was ending. This time, of all damn things, it was a toy. 

Pepper had meetings to attend, but wasn’t in the mood to get dressed and haul down to the city, so she was phoning it in, so to speak, via Tony’s handy dandy holoconferencing tech. That left Tony as attendant to their little princess. Some days, especially when her mommy was working, Morgan wanted to dress up, with baby’s first Starkpad in her tiny briefcase and her little feet wobbling in a pair of Pep’s old shoes, and stalk around the cabin ordering her imaginary workcrew around. On those days, he regretted ever having made fun of long-ago girlfriends when they cried over a litter of puppies or a sunset; weeping for joy hadn’t been in his emotional vocabulary, until he became a father. When his baby channeled her mom, though, he could hardly hold back a few tears, manly tears of course. 

Today, though, she had decided she was going full on daddy’s girl. He walked into her room to find a big robot toy Rhodey had given her, or rather the pieces of it, scattered across the rainbow rug printed with letters and numbers. “I took it apart,” she admitted, “an’ I can put it back together but I can’t make it work again. Can you help me?”

Tony grinned. “You bet. I’ll have to go put my arm on, but I’ll be right back.” Another thing his brain needed to get a clue on: rewiring to accommodate the structural changes that body Stark had undergone. This damned pain in an arm that wasn’t even there anymore had to stop. BARF was helping, but reprogramming the wetware between his ears was slow as hell. After he had a bad night full of dreams, it ached badly enough that he had to leave his prosthetic arm off for a while. It was the highest of high tech (well, excluding Wakanda, and he just didn’t want to put Shuri in a position to feel obliged to build him an arm when he could do well enough himself) but sometimes that sore stump couldn’t tolerate more pressure than a folded t-shirt sleeve. 

Morg shook her head. “No! I wanna do it, you just tell me how.”

He was slightly ashamed of the sigh of relief he managed to swallow. Easing himself to sit on the floor beside her, he turned off most of his brain to focus on his daughter’s little technical issue. It was fun, actually, once he got into it, like simple play for a grownup genius mind, to scan the parts as she held them up, stretching her little arm to reach his eye level, and mentally work out how the connections should go and how to explain them to her. Rejoining the wires she had pulled loose in her fit of baby-techie fervor was going to take a little soldering, but by the time they got that far, he had managed to relax enough that he thought he could hook his arm on, then finish fixing her little friend’s.

When Morgan handed him the limb, he examined it gravely, half planning upgrades they could make on it together, and wishing Howard had done this kind of thing with him. He turned the small arm, not much bigger than a fountain pen, over to inspect it further. The back of the hand had divots in the back, probably meant to be knuckles; but they looked far too much like the indentations he had programmed into the Mark 85 to contain those cursed magical rocks.

Just like that, his chest tightened up, and he fought to take his next breath. This time, alongside the panic, rage swept over him. He was not going to let that purple bastard run his life from the grave, not going to let him scare Tony’s child. With an almost physical effort, he forced the fear down and locked in on something tangible and real. The rug he sat on was a safe bet; he traced the numbers with his eyes, and moved his lips into the forms of square roots and sines and cosines and tangents.

“Daddy? Are you asleep?” his sweet girl’s voice pierced his consciousness, but by then he had mastered himself.

“Who, me, fall asleep on the smartest, prettiest girl in the room? Me? I’m offended.” That won him a giggle from her. He could handle this. He knew he could—he had to. It wasn’t like he had any option. He was so fortunate, to be alive, and safe, and reasonably intact, that stressing out over past trials felt ungrateful to the universe, in some weird way. For Morgan, and for Pepper, he could do this.


	3. Smell

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pepper coaxes Tony out of the house, but memories attack from a wholly unexpected quarter.

“We have been invited to a function,” Pepper informed Tony when her meetings were done, while she ate the salad he had tossed together for her. 

“ _We_ have? Well, I’m sure _you_ will enjoy it,” he snarked back.

“Oh no,” Pep disagreed. “This one is all on you, Mr. Stark, and you need to put in an appearance.”

Tony gestured slightly with the stump that used to be his right arm. “Mrs. Stark. I know you want me to have something approximating a normal life, but I’m fine with my current circumstances. Beaming into the tower for the occasional SI meeting, virtual peekaboos into R and D—”

Pepper cut him off. “Yes, you see, that’s why this is all on you. You praised the rustic life a bit too much to your employees, apparently.” To his utterly baffled frown, she explained that one of Tony’s tech ninjas had decided she and her wife needed to go full-on Green Acres and get out of the big city. They had found themselves an old farmhouse, not very far from the Starks’ lake house in fact, and thrown themselves into refurbishing it. With it finally renovated enough to host company, they were hosting a cookout, and insisted Tony should come help them christen the place.

“Clearly they aren’t using that term the way we did back in the day,” he smirked. “I know for sure I’m not Leah or Kaylee’s type, and they’re married, and I’m married, and none of us want our boss to fire us. I christened a few houses that way though, a boat or two, even a wheel loader up in Telluride one winter—”

Pep slapped her hand across his mouth, with that look he knew all too well and loved more, the look that said she was pretending to be irritated and trying not to encourage him by letting herself laugh at his foolishness. There was a note of something more serious in her eyes, though. “You’ve become a hermit, honey,” she said gently. “There won’t be that many people. I think Leah said her sister and brother-in-law were coming, but other than that, it’s just going to be your lab rats. So, you know them, and more importantly, they know you.” Her hand slid from his mouth to cup his scarred cheek, her lips taking the place of her palm pressing to his lips in a kiss. “I don’t want you to wither away here.”

“I’m not,” he insisted. “I never was really the party animal people thought I was. I…don’t have that hole in me anymore, the one that I was trying to fill on the social circuit.” He grinned. “I won’t lie though, a part of me would like to hang out with my ducklings in person and catch up.”

Maybe he was getting soft in his old age, but Tony found himself almost looking forward to it. Then, on the morning of the cookout, Morgan woke up with a cough and a low fever. Tony wasn’t about to go alone, of course, but he insisted that Pepper go. That wasn’t happening, obviously. Just as she was about to call in their regrets, a whiz-bang over the lake announced unexpected company. in the sparkly form of one Carol Danvers. Over a cup of coffee (she rolled her eyes in glee at the aroma of fresh ground beans, and swore nothing anywhere in the galaxy was like it) they caught her up. To their mutual shock, she volunteered babysitting duty. “It’s not like I can catch whatever she’s got,” she pointed out, “and you two deserve an evening out. We’ll find some low-level trouble to get into, won’t we, baby brain?”

Morgan looked brighter than she had all day, excited to spend an evening with her aunt Carol. Presented with the fait accompli, Tony dutifully put his arm on, and they headed down the road. The farmhouse was one he had passed on the road numerous times during the years between the snaps; its owners had been lost to Thanos, and by the time they returned, their fixer-upper was more weatherbeaten and they had lost interest. Leah and Kaylee had put a good dent in making it livable. 

Out back, familiar faces milled around a freshly dug pit with something smoking inside. Tony took a deep breath, feeling marginally safer in the shelter of his jacket and sunglasses, and was about to greet the hosts when the scent carried on the air hit him like a dump truck—a sweetish fatty smell, meat cooking, but too much like the one that had clogged his nostrils in his dying moments. He barely realized it when he hit the ground.


	4. Alternative POV

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An attendee at the cookout has a special skill set that comes in handy when Tony is in distress.

Maggie was so proud of Leah. From the awkward teen struggling to understand her sexuality, to the competent smart woman she had become, Maggie thought her baby sister was the best thing going. The house she and Kaylee had bought was pretty sweet too, she thought when she and Brett pulled up out front. Her husband wasn’t quite convinced. “Little far out in the country for a city girl like your sis, isn’t it?” he asked.

“She doesn’t think so,” Maggie replied as they walked around back to where a small crowd chatted and drank. The bulk of them were gathered around the firepit Leah had dug (because of course she did; she had loved working with her hands ever since they were kids) and planted a whole pig in to roast, while some bouncy pop music played. “Kaylee grew up on a farm, she misses fresh air and open space, and Leah figured it was worth a try. Plus, their boss lives up this way and raved about the area, apparently.”

“Their boss,” Brett nodded, “the infamous Tony Stark. They invited him, you said?”

“They did, but pretty good bet he won’t show. Everybody at Stark Industries seems to think the world of him, but a guy who saved the world isn’t likely to turn up at—oh fuck, there he is.”

The couple who walked into the gathering were casually dressed, just jeans and blouse on the woman with her gold-red hair up in a ponytail. The man beside her was similarly dressed down, a jacket tossed over jeans and a worn Metallica t-shirt, but the sunglasses he wore didn’t hide the scars on his face. Maggie tried not to stare; it seemed she and Brett were among the very few guests who didn’t work at SI, as people noticed the new arrivals and began to converge with exclamations of excitement and welcome. 

She couldn’t keep her brain from clicking into psychologist mode almost automatically though. The smile that snapped onto Stark’s face was too bright; the way he greeted and gladhanded like he was running for office was so clearly in opposition to the tension in his body. He had rarely been seen in public since the events that the whole of earth, and apparently other planets too, knew well: how Tony Stark, who made his name as the embodiment of rich and glamorous dissolution, had sacrificed his body, his health, and very nearly his life, to thwart the destruction of the universe. 

Maggie had always wondered why the cocky billionaire label had stuck so tightly to him. She had been in New York waiting to be shipped out to her new post overseas when the alien Chitauri had attacked, and watched in horror on a TV on base what was going on only blocks away. How anybody could have watched Iron Man intercept a missile and take it out a damn wormhole in the sky, and still call him selfish, was beyond her. That kind of thing had to change a person, and then to top it off with nearly dying in another alien conflict seemed to her like a setup for…yep, her eyes narrowed as she looked the man over from across the yard, that was not the guy she remembered seeing pictured on tabloid covers with starlets draped over him, back in the day. 

Brett nudged her. “What’s with the intensity, major? You’re not thinking about dumping me, are you?” he teased. “He’s not bad looking, considering the mileage.” She gave him an indulgent look and reached for the drink he had brought to her, then dropped it when Stark stiffened, his knees buckled, and he fell to the grass.


	5. PTSD

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony may just end up rescuing himself, with a little help from a new friend.

If he could sneeze, Tony thought frantically, it might clear the stink out of his nose, though it wouldn’t clear the buzzing from his head or slow the gallop of his heart. Nothing was likely to get any better unless he could _breathe_ , though, and that system wasn’t working well at the moment either.

Faintly over the clamor only he could hear, he caught an unfamiliar female voice. “I’m Leah’s sister Maggie, I’m a psychologist and I'd like to help if I can. Has he had panic attacks before?”

“Yes,” Pepper replied faintly after a moment of roaring silence. “Yes, several years ago, he went to a therapist…a few times, anyway. These are new though.”

“Mm-hm. Brett, grab Leah and Kaylee, and you guys round up the guests and move them away a little, give us some room?” Some noises, voices farther off, steps, objects being moved, and Tony strove to fix his attention on those to pull himself out of the tailspin. Then the newcomer spoke again, her voice pitched obviously toward Tony now. “Mr. Stark? Hi there.”

“Tony,” he managed. “Mr. Stark was my old man.”

A low chuckle responded, and Tony managed to get his eyes to focus. A stout, pleasant-faced Black woman of middle age squatted beside him. Her fluffy Afro blocked his view of those beyond her, and hopefully their view of him. “Okay then, Tony,” she said. “I'm Maggie. Do you need to move? Into the house, back to your vehicle?”

“No—no, I’ll be fine in a second. Although I imagine Leah and Kaylee would prefer if I left, after coming in and promptly causing a scene.”

The woman scoffed. “Our parents raised us to be more hospitable than that. You’re a guest, so you just sit there and take it easy.” 

Pepper’s hand rested on his prosthetic arm; he put his other hand over it and squeezed, and finally got up the courage to lift his eyes to hers. The worry he saw there made him want to get up and kick his own ass at least as far as Titan if not farther. A red plastic cup appeared in his line of sight, offered by the psychologist (and wasn’t that just his luck, to collapse in front of a specialist in exactly what this problem was?). This close, he was sure she could hear the faint click and whine of his arm as he took the drink from her and took a sip. It was lemonade, and pretty good, though he wished out loud for something stronger. 

“I wouldn’t recommend that just now,” Maggie said dryly. “Any idea what triggered that attack?”

He took a breath, cautiously but not cautiously enough; the smell still hung in the air. He gasped, opened his mouth to speak, then snapped it shut and looked away. “Tony,” Pepper urged him, “if you know, tell us, please.”

Tony’s eyes slid shut and he leaned a little of his weight against her. “Whatever’s cooking over there smelled way too much like me cooking.” Without looking, he felt Pep catch her breath. “It hasn’t happened before, like this, with a smell. Hell, I’ve cooked—” Pepper’s gasp morphed into a smothered snicker. “Okay, I’ve watched _you_ cook. Point is, I’ve been in the same room with meat cooking and it’s never…” He shook his head. “Sorry doc,” he went on. “You didn’t need to hear that, put you off your feed.”

“You must not have looked too closely at me,” she retorted, but with a note of amusement easy to hear. “Putting me off my feed is pretty hard to do. Smell is a surprisingly common trigger; since it’s the only sense that fires directly into the brain, it's the one most closely tied to memory. It’s good that you could identify what set you off—so many folks with PTSD have no clue.” Tony’s eyes popped open, and so did his mouth, ready to argue. Maggie was having none of that. “I’m a retired Army psychologist, I teach at NYU and work in their PTSD program at Langone Medical, so I know it when I see it. Frankly, looking at all you’ve been through, most of which is public knowledge, I’d be more surprised if you didn’t have a stress disorder.”

She spread the skirt of her sundress and settled to the ground beside him and Pepper, heedless of the grass. With her movement, Tony looked around. The other guests had indeed been ‘rounded up’, and stood at a short distance; they looked concerned, but weren’t staring or freaking out. “You all know me well enough to know how I like to be the center of attention,” he called. A small laugh made the rounds, and gave him enough encouragement to try getting up. Pep, Maggie, and a tall man he guessed was with Maggie, helped him to his feet, and he even assayed a feeble half-bow when a cheer and round of applause greeted him. “As you were,” he directed them. “Carry on, just lost my balance, nothing to see, I’m good.”

Pepper narrowed her eyes, but Maggie didn’t argue with him about dissembling to put the others at ease. He hoped she and her man would go on their way too, but he wasn’t escaping that easily. “Tony,” Maggie said, “your wife here implied you aren’t working with anybody on this now. If you’ve had some experience with a therapist, though, you probably already know that PTSD is an actual physical condition that causes chemical changes in the brain. In other words, it’s not something you can tough out. You’re a hero, sure, but you’re only human, and you’ve given so much to the world already, there is no damn reason for you to give up any other part of your life. I’d happily offer my services when you are ready to address it.”

Tony blinked. “What, you aren’t gonna nag me onto your couch?”

“That wouldn’t help either,” she said with a tolerant look very like Pep’s. “You have to be willing, for any progress to happen. So, when you are, you give me a call. Now, if you two are staying, let’s talk about something more pleasant—and I can ask Leah what else is on the menu that you might like, since autophagy doesn’t seem like a great way to spend an evening.”

Tony actually summoned a laugh. “Thinking I might go vegan for a while.”


End file.
